Juan Caballero

In May 1997, 45-year-old Reinaldo Vasquez and 31-year-old Juan Caballero were arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a male co-worker at Drayton Foods in Fargo, North Dakota, where all three men worked.

The 27-year-old complaint, B.S., was a forklift operator. He said that on May 6, 1997, he was summoned by intercom to a quality control room in the food warehouse. B.S. said that when he went into the room, Caballero came toward him and while they stood face-to-face, Caballero put his arms around him and tightly held his arms to his sides. Vasquez then approached from behind, pulled down his pants, and raped him.

Vasquez and Caballero went to trial in Cass County District Court in October 1997. The prosecution’s case relied almost solely on the testimony of B.S., who was mentally disabled and suffered from depression. On October 30, 1997, Vasquez was convicted of gross sexual imposition. Caballero was convicted of being an accomplice to gross sexual imposition.

Vasquez was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Caballero was sentenced to four years in prison.

In 2004, B.S., then 35 years old, was arrested in Cass County for stealing a car. While in custody, he told authorities that he had falsely accused Vasquez and Caballero because they had been teasing him at work.

By that time, Caballero had served his sentence and had been deported to his native Mexico. A lawyer for Vasquez filed a motion for a new trial in 2005.

On February 18, 2005, East Central District Judge Steven Marquart granted the motion and vacated Vasquez’s conviction. The prosecution then dismissed the charge.

Caballero’s wife, Maria, who had moved to Texas with their daughter, eventually hired a lawyer to file a motion to vacate Caballero’s conviction. On May 22, 2008, that motion was granted and the prosecution dismissed the charge.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence. The Registry also maintains a more limited database of known exonerations prior to 1989.

Contact Us

We welcome new information from any source about exonerations already on our list and about cases not in the Registry that might be exonerations.